Alan J. Perlis, 67, Pioneer In Computer Science

February 11, 1990|By New York Times News Service.

NEW HAVEN, CONN. — Alan J. Perlis, an educator and a leader in the development of computer science, died of a heart attack Wednesday in Yale-New Haven Hospital. He was 67, and lived in Woodbridge, Conn.

Mr. Perlis was a noted scholar and researcher in computer programming language design.

He had been Eugene Higgins Professor of Computer Science at Yale University since 1971 and played a leading role in the development of the university`s computer science department.

For the 1976-1977 school year and from 1978 to 1980, he served as chairman of the department, and in 1987 he was acting chairman.

From 1956 until he joined the faculty at Yale, Mr. Perlis taught at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, now Carnegie-Mellon University. He was chairman of the mathematics department and director of the computation center. He founded the graduate department of computer science at Carnegie Tech.

Before that, he was a mathematics professor and director of the computer science center at Purdue University.

A 1950 graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a Ph.D in mathematics, Mr. Perlis was a research mathematician at MIT and served as an adviser to the Multi-Machine Computing Laboratory at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland.

He is survived by his wife, Sydelle; a daughter, Andrea; two sons, Mark and Robert; a sister, a brother and two grandchildren.